Assisi, sitting on the side of a broad, sweeping mountain, is nothing more than a tiny, ancient village. I climb into its serene narrow streets as if I’m walking back into the Middle Ages. The place is extraordinarily quiet. The summer pilgrims are gone. The place is empty. It feels as if nothing is happening here, as if nothing ever happened here, and that is just right, the way it’s supposed to be. Assisi feels almost austere in its serenity. A deep peace pervades it.
The cheapest place I can find to stay is in a convent at the heart of the city, nearby the Basilica di San Francesco. A short nun leads me up wide stairs and down an empty hall lined with doorways. She stops in front of one of the doors and lets me in, holding out the key while warning me that the front door is locked at 10:00 p.m. She turns and leaves.
I enter and consider the room. It’s a monk’s cell. I can tell we are on the convent’s top floor because the ceilings slope in at odd angles. The room whispers of simplicity: a narrow bed, an unadorned desk, and a small, square window that is caught in the angles of the ceiling. The window, no more than a foot square, is open and looks out on the wide distant valley to the west from a great height. I watch for a long time as the sun descends on the far side of the valley, a red dissolving gong, as if the sun’s setting is the faint noise of the world fading away. Silence penetrates the room. I have no desire to go anywhere or to do anything but sit and watch the light in its dying splendour. It is as if I too am slipping away. I think it wouldn’t be so bad to lead a life of quiet contemplation in such a place.
Breakfast quickly cures me of that notion. Early in the morning, I look straight down from my high window to see a courtyard where a dozen nuns and short-term residents are seated at a long, wooden table having breakfast. I dress and head down, not wanting to miss the breakfast that’s included in the cost of the room. I join the sitters and eaters, all chewing in silence. A nun serves me a bowl of cornmeal porridge with a teaspoon of milk on top. On the table is a basket of tough, tenacious peasant bread and a pitcher of water. That’s it. A simple breakfast, indeed. I eat, trying to savour the simplicity, the unelaborated flavours, the raw, basic nature of it all. It’s probably exactly what I need after my struggle with the fish.
I finish my meal, grab my knapsack and head out for a cappuccino. Later that day, after a quick exploration of Assisi’s sights and highlights, followed by a series of quick rides, I am back in Rome, at the school, preparing for the next day’s classes.
Greece
Thanksgiving break is coming. We have ten days to go somewhere. The most time off I have ever previously enjoyed for American Thanksgiving, in all my years in school, was four days, but the school is aware that students are here to travel and travel they will.
Lebanese Michael and I sit talking over lunch in the school cafeteria, which is located in the basement at the rear of the school villa. We dig into our pasta. Since we have arrived, we have eaten pasta twice a day, every day, and have grown to enjoy it because it tastes like no pasta we have ever had before. Light on the sauce, always cooked al dente, it proves the highlight of every meal. Whenever the Italian cooks, all middle-aged women built like bears, try to prepare something they think North Americans will like, such as hamburgers or steak, it’s a disaster. Burgers the size of fifty-cent coins and gristly bloodless steaks no bigger than the heel of a shoe are the inevitable result.
The other delight of every meal are the little panini buns which the students have taken to stealing by the dozen in order to use them in the daily panini battles that occur in the main stairwell that spirals up four storeys through the centre of the villa.
The Jesuit administrators, led by the head of the school, Father Felice, don’t quite know what to make of these insane North American students who seem to be more and more out of control every year, “but never like this year, never before.”
In an irony of grand proportions, the Italian word, felice, means happy. Father Felice is said to have fought in the underground against the Nazis during the war and looks the part — straight jaw, short, but tough-looking with killer eyes, he strides the halls in his black robes with grim purpose. He stands before the crowded cafeteria and raises his hand for silence. The conversations cease immediately. He is the only person whom the students in the school fear because he seems unpredictable and perhaps a bit mad. With the atmosphere of anger held precariously in check that he carries around with him, he is the only person who can control this tribe of spoiled malcontents and cracked idiots.
He pauses, his hand still in the air, measuring the silence of the room and says entirely without inflection, “There will be no more throwing of food in the school.”
And we all know the daily bun fights will cease.
Lebanese Michael and I return to our conversation. “Where should we go over Thanksgiving?” he wonders.
“I’d like to see Greece, but I don’t have much money.”
“Me neither. But that’s a great idea. Let’s do it. I hear Greece is really inexpensive. We’ll hitchhike there and live cheap.”
So it’s decided. We make our plans and head off a few mornings later.
First we have to get from Rome south to the town of Brindisi, which is on the east coast of Italy in the heel of the boot, overlooking the Strait of Otranto in the southern Adriatic. There we will catch a ferry to Piraeus, the port of Athens. On the appointed morning, we polish up our thumbs and head off to the Autostrada on the outskirts of Rome. We begin by trying to thumb a ride south. After about an hour, we are just starting to question the wisdom of this approach, when a brand-new red Porsche squeals to a stop in front of us. We hop in with our knapsacks — I’m squeezed into a back seat built for a toy poodle — and we take off. We soon discover that a student from the school who recognized us — a rich Italian kid named Victor, from Cleveland — has picked us up. We know he’s rich because his daddy has just bought him this brand new sports car, and we know he’s Italian because he keeps telling us. But he’s different than the Italians we have met in Italy. It doesn’t take us long to realize he’s a capital-A Asshole — self-obsessed, arrogant, stupid. He thinks the Italians of Italy are fools and idiots.
“Why do you think they’re idiots?” I ask in my innocence, ready to defend a people I have come to love in a few short months.
“Because they’re poor. They wouldn’t be poor if they weren’t idiots.”
Michael and I scratch our heads. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sure it does.” He adds no further explanation, but goes into a long diatribe about everything that is wrong with Italy, Italians, Europe, the food, the beer, the politics, the postal service, taking every opportunity to praise every detail of the American way of life.
Because Victor has a heavy foot to match his fat head, we cover the nearly six hundred kilometres to Brindisi in record time, ripping past groves of ancient olive trees and quiet villages in a blur. It is clear he wants company on the long trip south so we oblige, but really what he wants is a captive audience he can bitch to. The price of admission for the hitchhiker. It’s a quick trip in his Porsche, but feels like a long trip, nonetheless.
We pull into Brindisi, buy our tickets for the ferry, and board. Because it will save us money, we have decided to get off with Victor at the small town of Igoumenitsa, on the north coast of Greece, across from the island of Corfu, and drive with him down through the mountainous countryside to Delphi and thence to Athens.
Once we leave the ferry at Igoumenitsa, the road south turns out to be a rougher ride than expected. About a hundred miles of the route is unpaved dirt and much of the mountain driving is Stairway-to-Heaven switchbacks, which Victor attacks like a dog on the hunt, driving his new Porsche as if he’s way behind at the Indy 500. Somehow I always get the back seat, which leads to what feels like permanent curvature of the spine. And Victor thinks the Greeks are even stupider than the Italians. Each time we pass country people walking